Sourcing caveat: Only one scorer (Bob Wilson, credited with a try hat-trick and noted there as the first player to achieve one in a Cup final) could be confirmed, from Broughton Rangers' own Wikipedia club-history section — found via a second research pass; the remaining four tries, all goal-kicking, and the referee could not be confirmed from available sources. No lineup for either team could be found. Lineup research (third pass): checked Bob Wilson's own Wikipedia biography (no teammates or 1902 Final details given beyond his top-try-scorer note for that season), the Rugby League Project competition summary page (no team-sheet section), and Broughton Rangers'/Salford's general club pages (no historic squad lists for this final). No lineup for either team could be found after this further search.
Scorers
Broughton Rangers
Tries: Bob Wilson (3 tries) (c)
Salford
No scorers recorded.
Starting line-ups haven't been added for this match yet — scoring, officials and sources above are sourced and correct; full team sheets are planned future work.
Match officials
Referee
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Match report
Broughton Rangers won the Challenge Cup for the first time with a commanding 25-0 defeat of Salford at the Athletic Ground, Rochdale on 26 April 1902. Broughton captain Bob Wilson became the first player to score a hat-trick of tries in a Challenge Cup Final, in a scoreline that stood as one of the more one-sided finals of the competition's early years. The Rugby League Challenge Cup is rugby league's oldest and most prestigious knockout competition, first contested in 1896/97 under what was then the Northern Union. Its history has been interrupted only by the two World Wars, with four editions lost between 1915/16 and 1918/19 and one more in 1939/40; the finals played either side of those gaps, and during the Second World War itself, were sometimes contested as regional or two-legged fixtures under wartime emergency arrangements rather than the usual single showpiece match. For much of the competition's early history the final rotated around northern club and representative grounds such as Headingley, Fartown, Central Park and the Athletic Ground, Rochdale, before Wembley Stadium became the final's permanent home from 1928/29 onward (with a short break during Wembley's 2000-2007 reconstruction, when finals were staged at Murrayfield, Twickenham and the Millennium Stadium instead). This was the 6th Challenge Cup final played, and, under the name “Broughton Rangers,” the 1st Challenge Cup title for the club. The result is recorded in this site's full results table alongside every other Challenge Cup final played since the competition's 1896/97 inception, cross-referenced against the venue and attendance figures gathered for that table. As with all of this site's rugby league match reports, any statistic that couldn't be confirmed from an accessible source — a scorer's name, an exact minute, a goal-kicking split — has been left out entirely rather than estimated, in line with the sourcing standard applied across the Challenge Cup, World Cup, World Club Challenge and domestic finals coverage on this site. The Challenge Cup final has long been treated as rugby league's flagship one-off occasion, drawing media and public attention that regularly outstrips any single regular-season league fixture, a status it has held for the entire span of the competition's history covered by this page.
Early rounds feature amateur and community clubs alongside professional ones; team names are linked only where this site has a team page for that exact club, matching the same safety-first approach used for the Final's own results table.
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